Call centers are typically used by organizations to service customers. Traditionally, customers called into a call center using POTS (plain old telephone service) but more and more organizations are implementing other types of media access such as email, voice mail, Web browsing, etc. to expand the ways by which their customers may contact them. Current attempts to integrate the different media into a single call center have proved ineffective because of the disparate nature of the different media types. For example, telephone calls usually average a few hundred a day, while emails often run into thousands a day, and daily hits on a Web site frequently number hundreds of thousands. Additionally, the response time expected by the customer varied depending on the media type used.
One approach processes a contact based on its media type. This approach ignores the fact that the same media type can be used for different types of service. For example, a customer that calls a manned help line requires different handling than a customer calling an interactive voice response system. Another approach is to handle all contacts identically, regardless of media type. This approach fails to account for the different number of contacts and different expected response times for a customer independent of the various media types. Thus, a call center that processes all calls as requiring an immediate response quickly becomes overloaded with emails. Furthermore, both of these approaches involve extensive modifications to the systems that underlie the call center, such as the email system, the telephony system, etc., so that the many of the original features and benefits of the underlying systems are lost. Additionally, while some previous implementations appear to integrate analog contacts, such as voice calls, and digital contacts, such as email, the actual processing of the two types of contacts is separated.